How to avoid toxic data and simplify compliance

Managing user consent effectively is a pressing issue for organizations that handle data. Given the explicit need for clarity over how user data is collected, stored, and used, publishers find themselves at the sharp end of the conversation.

To ensure data privacy compliance for advertising, a compliant consent notice is required for every individual partner a publisher works with, requiring a multitude of opt-in forms. 20 partners means 20 consent notices per user. It’s hard to imagine a more off-putting user-experience. Combined with the operational complexity this induces, and the fact that non-compliance can lead to harmful fines, it’s imperative to avoid what we call toxic data.

Data privacy compliance for advertising: The Commercial Consequences of Being Non Compliant

In the months leading up to GDPR, fears over penalties for using non-consented (aka toxic) data dominated reporting in the press. The harshest fines for noncompliance of up to €20m (approx. $24.7m, £17.4m) or 4% of annual revenue, whichever is greater, could spell the end for most businesses. Yet some commentators doubted the practicality of the new legislation, questioning whether it could be enforced on an international scale.

Fast forward to early 2019, and the long arm of GDPR is flexing its considerable muscle. The year began with formal complaints being filed against some of the biggest household names in consumer technology, alleging that they had failed to meet the new data privacy standards. This was quickly followed by serious fines being handed out, proving that GDPR has a considerable bite to back up its bark and must be treated with respect.

Data Privacy Compliance for Advertising and its Complexities

Even with significant legal resources and armies of engineers, data privacy compliance for advertising is clearly a challenge for even the biggest of tech giants. Understandable, therefore, how daunting it can be for smaller brands and publishers – and no surprise that 71% of marketers believe that a lack of compliance could have a detrimental impact on their companies’ ability to conduct business globally.

Publishers experience an additional degree of complexity due to the number of third-parties they work with to cover everything from optimizing revenue to analytics and insights. It’s not uncommon for apps to have upwards of 15 partner integrations, and typically publishers have limited visibility over whether consent notices from these partners are compliant with GDPR and other relevant legislation or not. This makes it convoluted and time-consuming to ensure the avoidance of toxic data. Furthermore, many consent notices today force users’ consent rather than giving them a clear and explicit choice to opt-in or out. This leads to an erosion of consumer trust, and lost business in the long term

Mobile publishers could be forgiven for thinking that these critical challenges will likely get worse before they get better. Fortunately, concerns over managing user data and streamlining data privacy compliance for advertising process now have a new, effective and efficient solution.

Your Route to Quality Data and Simplified Consent

Ogury Consent Manager has been created to help businesses move into the era of data transparency and user consent. It streamlines compliance for publishers by combining all consent notices from every demand and supply partner, technology solution, tracking or analytics provider into one convenient place.

Users are shown a single, GDPR compliant consent notice, providing them with a clear and informed choice to share data in return for relevant marketing recommendations, or to withhold. This minimizes disruption to their experience and simplifies holistic data privacy compliance for advertising and  for publishers.

Give Users A Clear Choice, With Options That Suit Them

Providing choice and control to consumers has been at Ogury’s core since the company’s creation in 2014. Long before GDPR, Ogury has held the foundational belief that trust between users and publishers can, and should, be at the heart of long term business success.

Data privacy compliance for advertising is necessary to avoid toxic data, but transparency and user choice are the foundations of trust. Legally-correct consent notices typically give the user two options: to opt-in and share data, or to opt-out and withhold. Ogury aims to help publishers build authentic relationships with users, embody transparency, and demonstrate the real world value of this data exchange. As such, a new capability will soon be released within Consent Manager called ‘Fair Choice’ that gives mobile users an additional option, to provide a total of three;

1. Opt-out of sharing their data, access content for free, but receive irrelevant and impersonal marketing.

2. Pay a fairly priced monetary fee, without sharing data, in exchange for a marketing-free experience.

3. Consent to share their data, access content for free, and receive valuable, relevant marketing from premium brands.

Ogury’s inspiration for creating ‘Fair Choice’ is rooted in the principle that there should be an equitable exchange between organizations and users when they opt to share their data. Ogury also recognises that many of the problems afflicting the mobile ecosystem today are a result of users opting out, withholding their data, but still being served irrelevant ads. This option leads to poor user experiences, weak campaign results for brands, and low earnings for publishers.

With ‘Fair Choice’, publishers can still elect to give users this option, but Ogury recommends against it, as it is the root of today’s lack of clarity between publishers and users. We believe that users should be placed firmly in control of their data while being presented with an additional way to access content and receive a fair exchange, but we also believe publishers, who are creating the quality content consumed by users, should be fairly rewarded for their efforts, with or without marketing.

Remove the Heavy Lifting From Optimizing Opt-In Rate

As if ensuring compliance, handling data correctly and respecting user experience weren’t enough, publishers also have to consider how to optimize opt-in acceptance rate. Something that could lead down a rabbit hole of endless manual A/B testing. Having served compliant consent notices to billions of individuals over the last five years, Ogury understands exactly how to do this, and has developed a specific technology for publishers to optimize acceptance rate automatically with AI.

Ogury’s intelligent consent optimization automatically adjusts criteria such as specific time of day, location and frequency for serving. Additionally, Consent Manager gives the option to apply dynamic creative optimization to adjust the layout of your form, based on the type of user. And with its easy‐to‐use monitoring dashboard, Ogury Consent Manager enables you to quickly digest the consent metrics that matter to you.

Consent Manager also allows for customization with a range of color schemes and layouts to match a publishers’ brand identity, and can be set to be delivered to users as frequently as deemed suitable.

Check for IAB Approval, and Beyond

The IAB Transparency and Consent Framework was created in June last year – as a collaboration between IAB Europe and IAB Tech Lab – to offer internationally recognized best practice for any organization looking to handle user data for marketing purposes. As an IAB approved Consent Management Provider (CMP), publishers can rest assured that Ogury Consent Manager not only meets the letter of the law put in place by GDPR, but is also aligned with all relevant standards as set by the leading authority in the field.

But where other solutions draw the line here, Ogury Consent Manager goes one step further by incorporating partners that fall outside of IAB jurisdiction, including Facebook and Google. The net result is a one-stop consent notice that covers the vast majority of partners available on the market today, with additional vendors being added on a regular basis.

No lingering concerns about toxic data or penalties over data misuse, and additional revenue options for your digital properties. Don’t run the risk of serving rogue marketing or frustrating your users with endless opt-in forms. As part of Ogury’s SDK, Consent Manager is available to all publishers on Android, iOS, and mobile web, free of charge, from today.

Should you have any questions or queries about Consent Manager or any of Ogury’s MJM solutions, contact us at hello@ogury.com

Sarah Jones, Product Marketing Director